The Episcopal Evangelical Tradition
By Bishop C. FitzSimons Allison, Virtueonline:
“In these latter years, watching the Episcopal church has been like watching a father kill himself with strange debauchery.” So writes a contemporary in a recent issue of the National Review. Not all agree to such discouragement but none can be particularly happy about the Episcopal Church whose statistics show an approximate 70 percent rise in the number of clergy while registering an approximate 17 percent decline in members from 1964 to 1977 and losing more than half its members between 1984 and 2016!
Yet the history of the church is a history of its enduring and prevailing over even greater distresses and discouragement. Such a time the church faced the American Revolution. Although consecration of bishops was secured from Britain after the the War, the Church was at the point of expiring two decades later. There was no bishop at all for Massachusetts from 1804 until 1811, for South Carolina from 1802 to 1812; and only two bishops attended the General Convention of 1808.
Bishop Provost of New York resigned in 1801. Bishop White made only one general diocesan visitation in his long tenure as Bishop of Pennsylvania. Bishop James Madison seemed to have resigned himself to the demise of the church in Virginia after only one diocesan visitation and called no more conventions after 1805 and attended no more meetings of the bishops. Other dioceses were in even sadder condition with nothing of this world to give encouragement and hope to what Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a churchman, described as hopeless.
Yet it was as this juncture that a revival within and of the Episcopal Church began with the inspired leadership of such evangelical figures as Richard Channing Moore, William Meade, Alexander Viets Griswold, Philander Chase, Charles P. McIlvaine, William Holland Wilmer, Gregory T. Bedell and Manton Eastburn.
Each was a converted man, convinced of his own unworthiness before God, saved by the atoning work of Christ, justified by faith alone, and dedicated to the work of spreading the Good News of the Christian Gospel.
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